Cloning old OS 9 disk with Panther upgrade

On or about 3/16/05 8:02 AM, thus spake "voxbongo" <voxbongoearthlink.net>:

> I have a Lombard G3 Powerbook running OS 9.1 (no
> snickering, still a nice machine).
>
> I'm
> planning to add more RAM and HD space to this laptop, and install Panther

Indeed. I've just installed Panther on an original Tangerine iBook and it
works surprisingly well.

.
> But I'd like to clone my entire current HD and keep it as a bootable partition
> on the new hard disk. What's the simplest, cheapest way to accomplish this?
>
> I was thinking of moving the current drive to a cheap external enclosure (USB
> 1.1 only--no FireWire on this PowerBook), making a disk image of it, then
> restoring that to a partition on the new internal disk.
>
> Will that work? And must that partition be exactly the same size as the old
> disk, or could I add a little extra space to it?
>
> [Should work fine, and I see no reason the partition couldn't be a little
> larger, although you might consider just moving the disk image back and
> mounting it when necessary, rather than committing to a partition scheme that
> may not make sense later on. -Adam]

On principle, I think it's a great idea to copy the contents of your hard
drive to external media, and wipe the drive, as part of the installation
process. (You're installing a new HD so you'd need to do this anyway.)

If you're willing to reboot into 9.2.2 on those occasions when you want to
start up in System 9, you don't need a separate partition, since the very
same 9.2.2 that serves as Classic can serve as a bootable System 9, and
System 9 and Mac OS X can co-exist on one partition just fine. However, if
you want both Classic 9.2.2 *and* your old 9.1, then yes, you do need
partitions, in order to separate the two System 9s from each other. That is
how I arranged my Pismo, which was my workhorse machine for many years, and
I was very happy with this.

Please note, however, that it is possible that your computer will not run
Mac OS X properly unless the first partition on the HD is small than 8 GB
and Mac OS X is installed in that partition. In theory the Lombard is exempt
from this rule, but if I were you I wouldn't take any chances.

As far as I can tell, your machine does not require any firmware upgrades,
which is a mercy.

m.
--
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On Mar 16, 2005, at 9:02 AM, voxbongo wrote:

> OK, call me a late adopter. I have a Lombard G3 Powerbook running OS
> 9.1 (no snickering, still a nice machine).
>
> Inspired by William Porter installing OS X on old iMacs (TidBITS
> #765), I'm planning to add more RAM and HD space to this laptop, and
> install Panther.
>
> I'd like to clone my entire current HD and keep it as a bootable
> partition on the new hard disk. What's the simplest, cheapest way to
> accomplish this?

You don't need a partition at all! All your OS 9 stuff can co-exist
quite peacefully with OS X, and you'll even retain dual-boot capability
within that single partition.

I would recommend re-organizing your OS 9 stuff into an Applications:
MacOS 9 folder, or something of the like, and moving your documents to
your user folder's documents folder. (Perhaps with an alias of said
folder at the root of the drive to make open/save from Classic a
simpler affair.)

I've been running my Cube in just this configuration for years. It
served me well during the transition between 9 and X, and still works
fabulously under Classic. Best of all, I don't have to re-partition
anything or deal with files on multiple partitions, which can be an
organizational hassle.

To do this, all you have to do is externalize your current drive and
copy all of its contents over to your new drive after installing OS X
(be sure to install OS 9 drivers when formatting -- it's an option in
Disk Utility). Then select your OS 9 system folder in the Classic
control panel (to bless it).

If you want to test OS 9 booting, go to Startup Disk and select your OS
9 folder.

No fuss, no muss, you're dual-booting.

If, however, you still want to partition, OS 9 doesn't require fancy
cloning at all. Format and partition your OS X drive (be sure to
install OS 9 drivers, as above), install X on one partition, and then
copy your old stuff to the second partition. Select in Classic (as
above), select in startup disk, and reboot, and you'll be in
Classic-land.

You may have to change aliases around after this process, but that's
more or less unavoidable.

--Nik

Thanks Matt, Nik, for the advice.

My goal is to keep my existing setup running as-is for the next few
months. I need a little time to get comfortable with OS X, and make
decisions about how to migrate to X-ready apps (e.g. will I convert
from Eudora to Apple Mail, etc.).

My concern is that I want to preserve my OS 9.1 environment with the
fewest possible changes--even just updating to 9.2.2 makes me uneasy
(did I mention that I don't deal well with change?).

That's why I hoped to make a perfect clone of my old 9.1 environment
on a separate partition--bootable, aliases intact, blah blah blah.

I might or might not install 9.2.2 on the X partition to run Classic
mode--I'll need to think about how important that convenience is to
me, vs. just rebooting from the 9.1 partition.

best,

  -- Ross

At 9:28 on 17-3-05, Matt Neuburg wrote:
> However, if you want both Classic 9.2.2 *and* your old 9.1, then
> yes, you do need partitions, in order to separate the two System 9s
> from each other.

Actually, even in this case you don't need to partition your drive.
You can have multiple 'classic' system folders on one partition with
no problem (I have about three on mine). To make it easy on yourself,
just give them descriptive names such as "System 9.2.2 Folder" and
"System 9.1 Folder". Then, when you want to boot from 9.1, just
choose "System 9.1 Folder" in the Startup Disk system preference
pane. Note that this will not disrupt your OS X Classic settings --
the next time you start Classic in OS X, it will continue to use the
9.2.2 folder (assuming you had previously been using this for
Classic).

_________________
=> Jolin Warren, Edinburgh, Scotland

At 9:28 AM -0800 3/17/05, Ross Orr wrote:
>My goal is to keep my existing setup running as-is for the next few
>months. I need a little time to get comfortable with OS X, and make
>decisions about how to migrate to X-ready apps (e.g. will I convert
>from Eudora to Apple Mail, etc.).
>
>(did I mention that I don't deal well with change?).

Ross,
If you're change adverse you might as well stay with Eudora on OS X
it may even be able to share the same folders/mailboxes running under
both OS 9 and OS X. (correct me Adam if I'm wrong) I very
specifically chose Eudora when migrating from Windows where I've used
Eudora since 1.4.something. I knew changing OSs would be slightly
traumatizing and lower my productivity, so I chose to use Eudora- a
program I already knew to mitigate this.

I still have mail from 1995 floating around that I wrote on my
Windows machine. (I only have sent mail in 1995, the received stuff
starts in 1996, why theres this discrepancy I'm not sure, but its fun
to read email from when I was 15.)

Nick

>OK, call me a late adopter. I have a Lombard G3 Powerbook running OS
>9.1 (no snickering, still a nice machine).
>
>Inspired by William Porter installing OS X on old iMacs (TidBITS
>#765), I'm planning to add more RAM and HD space to this laptop, and
>install Panther.

I too have a Lombard, and did install Panther on it.
This could save some sorrow : Lombard can have two 256MB memories,
even if documentation says it can host up to 192, but panther
installer does not like it.
i had many installer crashes until i removed my extra memory and put
back a single basic 128MB memory, then did the install and put the
512MB after successful install.
And there are visible differences between running panther with 256,
384 and 512 MB!

On Mar 17, 2005, at 10:28 AM, Ross Orr wrote:

> My concern is that I want to preserve my OS 9.1 environment with the
> fewest possible changes--even just updating to 9.2.2 makes me uneasy
> (did I mention that I don't deal well with change?).
>
> That's why I hoped to make a perfect clone of my old 9.1 environment
> on a separate partition--bootable, aliases intact, blah blah blah.

The easiest way to achieve this is with Apple Software Restore or an
image restore from Disk Utility under X. It can clone a disk straight
from one to another. This is somewhat easier to accomplish via Disk
Utility under OS X, but ASR under 9 can do it to. Just read the
documentation thoroughly on the latter.

Using Disk Utility, you just need to create an image of the device,
then you can restore an image to any drive/partition with or without
formatting. Pretty easy.

With ASR, you create an image, then you run a special checksum script
on the image to prepare it for restore, and then you restore the image
over a drive/partition, with or without formatting.

Again, Disk Utility's a lot easier and faster.

--Nik

At 14:06 -0800 UTC, on 2005/03/18, Nicholas Barnard wrote:

[...]

> If you're change adverse you might as well stay with Eudora on OS X
> it may even be able to share the same folders/mailboxes running under
> both OS 9 and OS X. (correct me Adam if I'm wrong)

Absolutely. (And it's not even a problem to use different version of Eudora.)
Just keep the "Eudora Folder" and all it contains in your OS 9 Documents
folder. Under Mac OS X put an alias in ~/Documents that points to it.

--
Sander Tekelenburg, <http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/>

Hi Nik
I tried several times all unsuccessful to install O S X on a G3 Power book.
I had planned to give it to my sister who lives in London ( I live in
Sydney). I wrestled with the problem for days and finally gave up, I believe
I have all the necessary disks but I simply could not install beyond 10.1
and sometimes I didn't get that far. I wiped the HD and started from scratch
but no luck. I downloaded various releases of OS X and OS 9 from the apple
site but all to no avail.
If it is not too much trouble could you possibly advise me what I need and
what I have to do and in which order so that I can achieve this apparently
simple operation.
I am a Mac user from the beginning and this is the first time I have quit on
a Mac related project.
Your help would make an old brother and sister very happy. I am travelling
at the moment and will be back in Sydney mid April. The G3 is not a Lombard
or a Wall Street.


[If I remember correctly, Mac OS X simply may not be compatible with the original PowerBook G3. -Adam]


Best regards

On 3/22/2005 10:38, "dorothy sanders" <dorothysbigpond.net.au> wrote:

> Hi Nik
> I tried several times all unsuccessful to install O S X on a G3 Power book.
> I had planned to give it to my sister who lives in London ( I live in
> Sydney).
> ...
> Your help would make an old brother and sister very happy. I am travelling
> at the moment and will be back in Sydney mid April. The G3 is not a Lombard
> or a Wall Street.
>
>
> [If I remember correctly, Mac OS X simply may not be compatible with the
> original PowerBook G3. -Adam]

There are also older Macintosh models require that Max OS X be installed in
an 8 gigabyte or smaller partition located first on the disk. It's a
firmware thing, and larger disks need to be partitioned appropriately.

The problem here could be either Adam's idea, or this one.

  --John (whose Mac will be categorized as "legacy" before the successor to
Tiger is released)

On Mar 22, 2005, at 11:38 AM, dorothy sanders wrote:

> I tried several times all unsuccessful to install O S X on a G3 Power
> book.
>
> [If I remember correctly, Mac OS X simply may not be compatible with
> the original PowerBook G3. -Adam]

Which model of Powerbook are you installing this on? I suspect that
you're running a Powerbook model that isn't supported by MacOS X. While
I have no personal experience installing OS X on unsupported machines,
here's what I know about it:

According to Apple's MacOS X page, Panther (10.3) is only supported on
the Bronze Keyboard Powerbook G3s. Earlier G3s (aka Powerbook G3 and
Wallstreet) are not officially supported. I'm not sure about the
requirements for earlier versions of OS X, but I seem to recall that on
some G3s they worked poorly without additional aid.

<http://www.apple.com/macosx/upgrade/requirements.html>

Other World Computing offers a utility called Xpostfacto which allows
for OS X to be installed on a variety of machines, although full
support for some features seems to be lacking. This program is free to
try and fairly inexpensive if you wish to register it.

It appears that on some models of Powerbooks, there are some
compromises. You can read more at the link below:

<http://eshop.macsales.com/OSXCenter/XPostFacto/Framework.cfm?
page=Compatibility.html#Powerbooks>

--Nik

Thanks to all who offered suggestions and help--the deed is done!

I had one hiccup, afer I partitioned the new disk directly from the Panther installer--at first it wouldn't accept either new volume as a destination, until I restarted.

After that, I had no problem installing Panther into a 33 GB partion (e.g. there was no 8 GB limit). And unlike fhl, I had 320 MB of RAM installed with no trouble.

As someone whose first mac ran system 7.1, I was mightily impressed by a system install that took HOURS (including the update/optimization for 10.3.8).

So, to answer my original question: Panther's Disk Utility was able to clone directly from disk to disk using "Restore." (As long as you drag disk icons from its sidebar, not the finder!) I now have my whole 9.1 environment on the new disk partition, and aliases seem to have survived intact.

I actually started out creating a disk image of my old disk--but the image/scan/restore process looked like it was going to take *forever*. (Even the direct disk-disk clone took 90 minutes for 4 GB over the USB 1.1. bus!)

Having the destination disk be a larger size than the source also worked fine,as Adam guessed.

So,thanks again everyone---Ross

Although the deed is done, here is some additional advice: It is a great idea to buy an external box for your old drive and it is also a great idea to put OS9 on a separate partition. The problem with Panther is that you need a boatload of disk space on the boot partition, so if you can get a bigger partition for OSX, do so because OSX is a hog and everything wants to dump stuff to the basic system folders (user, document etc). You've done that so good. I have used OS9 on a separate partition ever since OSX came out and I am grateful I have. Keep your valuable data files on that partition--like word processing documents. You are much less likely to have the second partition corrupted than your OSX boot partition. Panther should have attempted to create its own "classic" system on the boot partition. I got rid of most of this classic stuff on all my systems and they work fine--but I can't get rid of my OS9Application folder for some reason, so I emptied that folder. I have stuff in my system folder that is unbeleivably old. I am still using 1987 vintage Quickdex and so forth. I could update this stuff if I had the time, but it's too hard. Here is a tip: Drop Eudora 5.1 and any old classic versions of Eudora. I also have email from 1995, and if you keep the classic-launching Eudora, it will corrupt your entire email file sooner or later, and you will lose coherent versions of the files back to your backup--As it has done several times to me.I am using the sponsered version of Eudora 6.2 now and it seems stable. (I want to completely convert to Entourage, but I can't give up the sanctity of Eudora, and now I'm wondering if I will want to use the new Mail in Tiger--talk about conflicted). It is fascinating that Panther runs on a Lombard--and it's pretty fast also. My daughter beats the crap out of my old Lombard and so far it just keeps going. If you want to know more, get on the G-book list at low end mac.